Weblog: Archive

Chris Glass has posted a HOWTO on a more humane mousetrap:

Balance the tube precariously on the edge of a table or counter with the treat hanging directly over the tall sided receptacle. The mouse will scurry to the treat (they like tunnels) and fall into the trap.

I learned this technique from the Kapulainen kids when spending childhood summers in Turku archipelago. They were using it to catch a forest mouse to keep as a pet. It didn't work with rats, though, as they were strong enough to jump out of the bucket after capture.

I'd completely forgotten the episode until I ran into this story on Boing Boing tonight.

One Six Right, the documentary about the Van Nuys General Aviation airport in Los Angeles is available on Google Video (Updated: not available)

The documentary tells the story of this historic airport well, and outlines how important general aviation is to the whole aviation industry. It also shows several beautiful historic airplanes flying from Van Nuys.

Something similar could help the other historic and endangered airport, Helsinki-Malmi. The MIK videos are of course a good start.

Just watching the video makes me really want to go flying again. Luckily the weather is improving all the time.

Video link via Tigert.

Updated 2006-03-22: Seems that the movie isn't available any more. For some reason I'm getting nasty lawyer letters about this blog post...

Posting movies on the Internet is illegal, and promoting them or linking to them is also in violation of International copyright law and is prosecutable if no action if taken.

Every now and then iSync simply stops working. Apart from the other problems, I'm seeing a lot of "Unable to connect".

If you get this error message, try if your Bluetooth connection to the mobile phone works otherwise. If it does, then the way to fix iSync is to reboot the Mac.

Maybe Apple should stop devising new ways to lock their customers into .Mac and make synchronization just work?

In the other news, there is a bus strike now in Helsinki. Traffic is a scary combination of lots of snow and people who usually don't drive.

We will have a quite interesting drive from Dallas to EclipseCon next week:

Depending on the mileage we get, places like Grand Canyon and Monument Valley are on the way. I've done some driving in the US before, but nothing this long.

Looks like Apple is trying to patent RSS feeds and RSS auto-discovery:

Techniques for detecting, managing, and presenting syndication XML (feeds) are disclosed. In one embodiment, a web browser automatically determines that a web site is publishing feeds and notifies the user, who can then access the feed easily. In another embodiment, a browser determines that a web page or feed is advertising relationship XML, and displays information about the people identified in the relationship XML. In yet another embodiment, a browser determines that a file contains a feed and enables the user to view it in a user-friendly way. In yet another embodiment, feed state information is stored in a repository that is accessible by applications that are used to view the feed. In yet another embodiment, if a feed's state changes, an application notifies the repository, and the state is updated. In yet another embodiment, a feed is parsed and stored in a structured way.

Now, the RSS format and feed readers have been around for quite a while. I remember generating feeds in RSS precursor Channel Definition Format for consumption by Microsoft Active Desktop around 1997 or 1998. The Apple patent applications are from January 2005 so there is quite obvious prior art.

Apple started doing silly things with RSS with the PhotoCast mess and this is a quite logical continuation.

Via Miguel de Icaza.

There is a post on Tapestry plug-in weblog analyzing the participants of the EclipseCon Open Source Pavilion. The post is a bit doubtful on Midgard's participation:

On surface this is a -1, irrelavent. But, looking deeper they are a showcase for the PHPEclipse plug-in. +1

Of course Midgard as a C and PHP project doesn't directly have anything to do with Eclipse. However, there are several points where the two connect and those are something I wish to demonstrate there:

• PhpEclipse is the default development tool for building MidCOM components
• Midgard supports the Java Content Repository standard and so could be manageable using the Eclipse JCR plug-ins
• OpenPsa, the Midgard ERP package is getting integrated with Digital Business Ecosystem and DBE Studio for Eclipse

In the other news, somebody in the event will be lucky enough to win a cool Midgard messenger bag designed by Tony Lee

2006-03-18 02:25Z: Rolling on prairie powered by beef jerky. We left Dallas in the morning and found sun after Amarillo. No tumbleweed yet.

2006-03-18 02:30Z: Stars shine above the desert as we head west on the Interstate 40 abeam Moriarty in New Mexico. Monty Python's Galaxy Song amuses.

2006-03-18 05:20Z: We're overnighting in a motel in Grants, NM. This is indian country, the road is littered with casinos.

2006-03-18 19:00Z: We found the first patches of snow while driving towards Arizona surrounded by towering red mesas. Passed the Continental Divide at 2300m.

2006-03-19 19:20Z: We left Las Vegas on sunny morning and headed to Mojave desert. Past are the snows of Grand Canyon.

2006-03-20 06:15Z: We arrived safely to San Francisco, and got sprayed by skunks while looking at the Golden Gate bridge. Car misfired a bit in the desert.

The Midgard booth is now all set up in EclipseCon 2006 Open Source Pavilion. If you read this, feel free to drop in to booth 416 and enjoy an M candy and some Midgard talk.

So far the Open Source Pavilion has been quite quiet, but I already had one Midgard user to drop in and chat a bit. The conference is sold out, so we can expect the day to be busy later on.

Donald Smith is blogging the conference.

Updated 2006-03-22: I had some interesting conversations yesterday with both current and prospective Midgard users. Today I'm looking forward to catching Andi Gutmans' PHP IDE talk.

The Midgard Bag was awarded to Martin Perez from the jLibrary project:

jLibrary is an interesting desktop document management client that uses Java Content Repository as its back-end. Theoretically it could be made to work as an OpenPsa Documents front-end.

Updated 22:43Z: The Zend Eclipse IDE looks promising, and others seem to agree. It has very nice syntax highlighting support, and supports creating custom PHP code templates. I wonder if that feature could be used for creating a MidCOM component template.

I had some talk with Andi Gutmans about the Zend Framework. It seems they are willing to consider PEAR packaging the Framework once they get it to a more complete stage. That would be a very good step, as then other packages like Midgard could easily depend on parts of the Framework.

They're currently also looking at the different component architectures. I showed a quick demo of how MidCOM components are constructed and configured. Obviously MidCOM is quite specific to Midgard but some ideas from it might still be useful.

Generally I was a bit wary of the Zend Framework before actually meeting Andi. He got me convinced that they're actually trying to do the right things for the community, but are trying to be careful and only publish ready stuff at the same time. I have to agree that publishing running code easily beats just talking about it.

I started this blog on March 19th 2004. 332 entries and two years later it is time to reflect whether blogging makes sense.

I didn't want to start a blog as a personal diary, and so stayed away from the phenomenon for quite a while. But then Paul Everitt told about his way of blogging: keeping blog as a centralized place to post information people ask about. With blogs you have a URL for each post you can point people to when they ask about something.

This wasn't the first time I was blogging. I had what nowadays would be called a weblog on my site in 1997-98, and have blogged several of my motorcycle trips to Routa MC Journals. However, this was the first time I started to actively maintain a centralized weblog.

During this time the site has grown from about 50 daily visitors to over 2000. That figure is quite close to major consumer portals in Finland. The blog is featured on several Planet aggregators, and so is probably seen by even bigger number of people. This clearly shows there is demand for the blog.

On the more questionable side, the blog has also managed to annoy somebody enough to write code to censor it. I have to admit I've been posting long entries, entries with lots of pictures, and entries about very specific subjects that may not be relevant to everybody. But then again, this is my blog and I'm entitled to post whatever I want. :-)

Updated 2006-03-28: Paul Scrivens is asking whether designers can afford not to blog.

2006-03-24 08:25Z: We left San Francisco in the morning and have followed the coastal US-101. Santa Barbara is now behind us as we approach LA.

2006-03-24 09:30Z: Rotten hamburgers on Hollywood boulevard made us happy to leave the City of Dreams. Headed south to San Diego.

2006-03-24 17:50Z: Heading east on I-8. Snow-capped mountains loom ahead as we ascend from the Pasific coast.

2006-03-25 00:15Z: Huge cactuses and brown peaks dominate the view as we roll through the sands of Arizona. Soon in Tucson.

2006-03-25 18:05Z: Breakfast in El Paso and Texan soil under our feet. No Hattori Hanzo swords in pawn shops, though.

2006-03-25 22:35Z: Road is surrounded by endless roadkills and oil pumps as we approach Odessa. Pecos and Rio Grande are already behind us.

In order to make my news-reading process less time consuming, I've now switched from NetNewsWire running all the time on my PowerBook to the Bloglines web service primarily used through my Nokia 770 handheld browser.

Why use Bloglines? There are some good reasons:

1. Bloglines centralizes RSS feed fetching, making news reading less bandwidth-intensive
2. It centralizes information of what items I have read, meaning that I see only unread things whether I use my Mac, my 770, or some other computer at a client
3. their subscription sharing system enables me to easily back up my subscription list as OPML. Even if Bloglines shut their service tomorrow, only thing I would lose would be information on which items I've read and which not

If the news items contain something interesting I will want to return to later or blog about, I can bookmark it using my del.icio.us account. The del.icio.us bookmarks used to be synchronized with my own site, but this isn't operational at the moment.

Making things work even better

In ideal world I would be able to do most of this offline. I would connect my 770 to the net before leaving home and synchronize the news there. Then I could read the news in bus or over breakfast, and bookmark the interesting items.

There is an offline Bloglines client for Nokia 770, but it is still at quite early staging and crashes quite often.

Similarly, there is a quite nice del.icio.us client, but as far as I know it doesn't support saving bookmarks while offline.

If these two issues would be resolved, I would have a quite perfect news-reading and research setup.

The MidCOM PEAR channel has now been upgraded to the Chiara_PEAR_Server version of PEAR channel serving. The upgrade went mostly painlessly following Greg Beaver's instructions.

The main change with the upgrade is that now the server uses PEAR's REST API which should make things faster and more stable. It also means that you need to upgrade the package definition on any server where you want to install MidCOM packages:

# pear channel-update pear.midcom-project.org

The other change is that we now have a nice web frontend for browsing packages powered by the Crtx_PEAR_Channel_Frontend.

Please report if you encounter any issues after this upgrade.

Updated 18:05Z: Planet Midgard is now subscribed to the PEAR channel releases feed.

For quite a while we have been using IRC for instant messaging and company internal chat. IRC is handy for it, especially as we've been able to set up some bots to secure our own channels.

However, as we already use GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) for securing our email communications, it makes sense to also start encrypting the instant messaging conversations.

While there are several different secure IM options available ranging from Skype to Off-the-Record Messaging. These are good alternatives, but since we already have the GPG key management infrastructure set up it makes sense to utilize it. And of course Jabber and Psi are open, multi-platform and standardized.

Steps for setting up secure, encrypted instant messaging:

1. Create Google Talk account (or some other Jabber account)
2. Download and install Psi client, and connect to Google Talk
3. Generate a GPG key (if you don't already have one for secure email)
4. Set up GPG encryption for Psi

After this you can have encrypted conversations with any Jabber user whose public key you have.

Here is a screenshot of me having an IM conversation and switching encryption on and off couple times:

And here is how the raw Jabber XML output with encrypted messages looks like:

The GPG encrypted Jabber conversations with Psi follow the JEP-0027: Current Jabber OpenPGP Usage specification.